Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature. —Lévi-Strauss

If a liar declares, “I am lying,” is the liar telling the truth? —Vittorio Bufacchi (defining “liar’s paradox”)

Man is condemned to be free. —Jean-Paul Sartre

After forty years of warning us about the dangers of postmodernism, the right now sounds like Jacques Derrida, and in the wake of Trump’s kidnapping of Perspectivism, the left now sounds like Allan Bloom.

More or less simultaneously, Trump, Giuliani, Conway, Bannon, Putin, and Vladislav Surkov (performance-artist-turned-Putin-strategist) all learned to make the same move: Well, that’s just what you say.

The “paradox” is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality “ought to be.” —Richard Feynman

What was Aristotle’s life? The answer lies in a single sentence: “He was born, he thought, and he died.” —Heidegger

Timeline I. 1850–1900 Melville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche: God is dead, and we have killed him. II. 1917–1945 WWI and WWII: Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, et al.: There is no “essence”; there is only existence—being and then nothingness: only Sisyphus pushing his boulder up and down the mountain until he dies; nothing “matters” absolutely; implicitly,

Trump revels in chaos, and most people don’t; they will do anything to get the noise to stop.